An Interview With Peter Zinovieff, “Britain’s Bob Moog”

This video, via SOS, captures an interview with Peter Zinovieff, who has been described as Britain’s Bob Moog.

A renowned composer from the mid ‘60s to the present day, Zinovieff was also one of the founders of Electronic Music Studios (EMS), who produced seminal synthesizers such as the VCS3 and the Synthi AKS, used by Brian Eno, Pink Floyd and the Chemical Brothers.

SOS met him in his home studio to discuss half a century of technological innovation and musical development, from his first experimental studio, to his use of early computers, as well as his compositions and the latest music production software.

It is inspiring to see a man as accomplished and in advanced age, so utterly able to embrace to technologies, methods and tools for creating music. It should be a lesson to us all, as some of us are stepped in all things analog or modular, it is ultimately the end, and not the means.

I think there’s another lesson about technology in this interview: Don’t be afraid to seek out people who can build things for you or build it yourself. That is, don’t limit yourself to what is available on the market right now, but only by your imagination (and budget of course).

What boggles my mind in the interview is that he allegedly wanted to do sampling and was using resynthesis techniques to achieve that. Perhaps I misunderstand, but that struck me as odd given that he and his consorts could have come up with the idea of digitizing sound and replaying it via the computers available to them (for instance). Perhaps the high price of memory was at the heart of the matter?